When machine-to-machine (M2M) devices (e.g. a sensor) connect to a network, the network must be configured to handle the information provided by the devices. In practice this means the network needs to know where to send the data provided by the device.
Current cloud environments provide application programming interfaces (APIs) to remotely manage virtual machines. This requires support for the API in a remote node (e.g. NOVA API). Virtual machines can be used for virtualization of processing power and resources of a physical machine.
Creation and usage of virtual machines require IP connectivity. Practically all IP devices are capable of using either IPv4 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) or IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND).
The cloud concept provides an environment which supports dynamic creation of virtual machines (VMs) that can be assigned to handle the device data. The cloud environment provides better scalability than a traditional data center model. The motivation to create a dedicated virtual machine for each user is also to provide a database for collected sensor data that is accessible even if the actual sensor is no longer reachable.
Normally, devices that need to virtualize processing power and resources are constrained devices, e.g. M2M or Internet of Things (IoT) devices, regarding available memory and central processing unit (CPU) power. For this reason, implementing cloud environment clients for these devices is not practical. However, the devices are normally IP capable and therefore extensions to the IP configuration protocols can be used to achieve virtualization support.